The proposed study aims at a systematic description of the psychological survival problems of death row inmates. This will include an inventory of stressful features of death row confinement and a catalogue of responses to such pressures. The focus will be on adjustment problems and crises. These will be reconstructed through interviews. Motivational themes characterizing adjustment problems and crises will be grouped into a typology, which, in turn, will be related to relevant demographic and contextual variables. Critical contextual variables include the constraints of the death row setting and the prospect of death by execution. A distinction will be drawn in analysis between dominant and secondary concerns related to psychological survival, and between recurring and non-recurring adjustment difficulties. An effort will be made to conceptualize stress sequences in ways that may point to strategies for change and that may allow for the development and assessment of correctional standards applicable to death row.